command to *void* drive

[theNoof]

Describe the solution you'd like

a void (or similar) subcommand that completely voids partition tables and all data from a drive (if possible securely voided, e.g. there is no real way to revive it)

Describe alternatives you've considered

there are of course programs that already do that. for example, i wrote a small shell script that does about that, but it isnt as beatiful. having this functionality in caligula would be great

[ifd3f]

That sounds like a good feature to add.

My pedestrian understanding of secure disk erasure is that there's several ways to do this, with varying effectiveness:

• Many drives (but not all) have a secure erase command that you can send that deletes the encryption key, and that's the most effective method.
• If you can't do that, then writing data to the disk gets rid of a large amount of data, but not all of it, especially due to wear leveling. These may need multiple passes, but even then it's not guaranteed you'd erase all the data. Zero is fast but less secure, random is slow but more secure.
• Of course, there's always physical destruction, but I think that's out of scope :)

Following Caligula's philosophy, I'd want the software to have sane and correct defaults, but still implement all (or most) of the methods and let the user decide. This will probably manifest as sending a secure erase, but if that fails, falling back to random fill, with a disclaimer text describing the drawbacks.